May Sarton
From Philosopedia
Sarton, May (1912–1995)
Sarton was born in Belgium but moved to Massachusetts at the age of four when her father became a Harvard professor. By the age of eighteen she had had two poems accepted by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Encounter in April (1936), her first book of lyrics, was followed by several volumes of poetry. The Single Hound (1938) was published by Elizabeth Bowen, by that time her lover. When thirty-four, Sarton fell in love with a Simmons College English teacher, Judy Matlack, moving in with her. Margot Peters, in May Sarton: A Biography (1997), details the literary bad girl’s love affairs with numbers of individuals from Muriel Rukeyser to her own shrink. Included are the drunken brawls, her father’s paying for girlfriends’ ship tickets, her mediocre reviews, her teaching at Wellesley, and her winning a Guggenheim. Included are details of her intense relationships, her compelling hunger for affection, and her disappointments at not being known for her work but, rather, for being a spokeswoman for lesbian coming out.
Sarton’s novels include Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), which describes a distinguished Harvard professor’s life and suicide; I Knew a Phoenix (1959), which were sketches for an autobiography; Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), an openly lesbian novel in which she revealed her homosexuality; and At Seventy: A Journal (1985), which received the American Book Award. Published posthumously in 1995 was At Eighty-Two, based upon the journal she kept up to her death and containing her annoyance at being old: uncertain balance, clumsy fingers, mislaid names and objects, inadequate strength, frequent pain, and the admission that “words do not obey me anymore.”
Although in the 1990s the National Endowment of the Arts frowned upon giving financial grants to anyone who was homosexual or lesbian, Sarton in 1967 had received NEA grant money. She stated she was “proud of the fact that I came out as a lesbian in 1965” but that she had done so only after her parents’ deaths. “I’m not sure I would have done it if they had been alive.” She objected to being labeled a “lesbian writer,” adding, “I think my work is universal, and I think my value is as a maker of bridges between two worlds—homosexuals and heterosexuals, between old and young, between men and women.”
A Unitarian, she taught or lectured at Harvard, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Colorado College, Beloit College, the University of Kansas, and Dennison University. In 1993 at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, where funeral services were held for a 100-year-old elm tree, felled to make room for constructing a school, Sarton’s poetry was featured. She had written, “Is there a more unnerving sound than the hideous mechanistic screech of a buzz saw at work? It is an anti-sound; it does not fit with any landscape.”
Sarton was a long-time friend of the actress Eva le Gallienne, with whom she studied acting and who also a non-believer. Upon becoming an octogenarian in 1993, Sarton wrote Encore: A Journal of the 80th Year, discreetly making no further mention, as she had in a 1973 journal, that she, like the Mrs. Stevens of the 1965 novel, was a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive . . . a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality. Such a revelation by so stellar a poet made her an immediate heroine to feminists.
Although ignored by most critics, Sarton was described by Enid Nemy as “a commanding, no-nonsense figure with clear blue eyes and a shock of white hair,” a woman who lived in “self-imposed loneliness” in a weathered clapboard house on the Maine coast. She had had, she admitted, a difficult life being a seeker after truths, an ardent explorer of life’s important questions. An individualistic and stoical figure, Sarton died of breast cancer. Asked before her death how she would like to be remembered, she replied, “As wholly human.”
